A Not Quite Matched Pair
by Lucillia
Summary: After being killed by Lucifer, Gabriel is dropped into "Witness Protection". After interfering back home, he won't be staying out of things here, especially when there's a certain someone to knock down a couple of pegs.
1. What a Ride!

"There isn't room in hell for the both of us Gabriel." Lucifer said as he kissed his index and middle fingers and touched the ground, releasing his brother from Hell and back into the world of the living, reviving him in the process.

Normally, he wouldn't do something like this, but Gabriel had gone and destroyed half of Hell in the four years that he'd been there. The lake of fire hadn't quite been the same since his brother had gotten his hands on it.

With a sigh that was a mix of relief and annoyance over what he'd be stuck repairing now that his brother was no longer wreaking havoc in his realm, Lucifer turned into a murder of crows and flew back to his domain, which was not Daddy's Basement, no matter how many times the other angels called it that.

After Lucifer departed, the asphalt of the abandoned parking lot that Lucifer had been standing in at the time he'd gone to Earth to kick his annoying little brother out of hell before he completely trashed the place started to melt. Across town, in a monastery, there was a commotion that a number of monks were trying to respond to, but having some difficulty doing so as Brother Thomas had locked the door to his room.

"He's coming!" Brother Thomas who had previously been Detective Daggett yelled as he threw things about his room adding to the ruckus which had disrupted the sleep and prayers of his fellow monks. "Gabriel's coming! Gabriel's...the fuck?"

Back at the abandoned parking lot, the earth beneath the bubbling asphalt in which a rather nice looking silver car which hadn't been stolen despite the neighborhood was sinking cracked open revealing what looked to be magma, except for the fact that it wasn't bubbling up out of the ground in a highly destructive manner as magma was wont to do when it was freed of the mantle, and the fact that screams of the damned could be heard emanating from the cracks in the earth. One crack opened wide, and a naked man crawled out. As soon as he was free, the earth closed back up, and the asphalt ceased to melt.

The naked dirt and mud covered man who was actually an Archangel lay on the ground panting, trying to catch his breath.

"Wow. That was one heck of a ride." a voice said right next to the angel's ear. "It was nice of dad to exploit a loophole like that and drop me in Witness Protection himself, but did he have to drag me through Hell backwards?"

The angel turned his head and found himself looking up at a casually dressed man of relatively short stature who was dressed in black jeans, and a black shirt with a green jacket thrown over it. The clothes appeared to be rather singed from their journey through Hell. The man who had light brown hair and hazel eyes that were more of an ambery gold color was looking down at a hole in his burnt shirt and frowning.

"Excuse me," the Archangel Gabriel who was still laying there naked as he hadn't yet had the presence of mind to clothe himself said. "But who are you?"

The stranger that Gabriel had the strongest feeling wasn't a talking monkey turned and looked at him in surprise. He then studied him a bit, and instead of answering his question, he started laughing. This naturally didn't endear the stranger to Gabriel who was used to receiving respect, even during his little stint in Hell. None of his brothers had ever laughed at him like that, and all of the humans he'd encountered had been too wary of him to do so either.

"I asked you a question!" Gabriel said as he stood up, dressing himself as he did so.

"You, " haha, "You," snerk, "Mean that you don't" snort "know?" the stranger choked out between laughs.

"Know what?" Gabriel asked.

"Oh, man. I knew that Father had a sense of humor when he went and created the duck-billed platypus for me, but this takes the cake." the stranger said when he finally brought his laughter under control.

It was in that moment Gabriel knew. Gabriel knew that while he was unique and the only Archangel Gabriel in the universe, he wasn't the only Gabriel in existence, and that didn't count the number of talking monkeys who had been given his name. Father had apparently dumped this other Gabriel here to show him how unimportant he was to him in the grand scale of things.

"You don't look very dignified for an Angel of Death." he finally said as he straightened out the collar of his coat after taking measure of the other Gabriel.

"That's because back home death is Death's job." the other Gabriel replied with a smirk that immediately grated on his nerves as he caused a candy bar to appear with a snap of his fingers and bit into it.

There was something of an evil glint in the other Gabriel's eyes that sent a shiver up Gabriel's spine and made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. He had the feeling that if he tried to make a play for dominance right now when he was not yet back at the top of his game, he would lose, and lose badly. Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor, Gabriel set about his task which was the prevention of the birth of the Nephilim.

Gabriel the Trickster watched the tall dark and lanky Gabriel of Death who seemed to revel in the fact that he lived with one wing dipped in blood depart, glad to see the back of him.

"What a dick." Gabriel said before viciously biting into his candy bar when his counterpart rounded a corner, departing from his sight.

He knew one being that he'd be knocking down a couple of pegs while he was here.


	2. Imagine

As Valerie Rosales was driving to work, and having an angel throw itself at her car, a being who had been known as both Loki and Gabriel during his lifetime was at a hospital that something had told him was the center of things to come applying for a job as a janitor. He didn't really need the money since he could turn just about anything into anything he wanted, and cause just about anything he wanted to materialize out of nowhere, such as the birth records that were now sitting on file in some random county archive in Tennessee and his new I.D., but he liked having something to do during the day other than meting out his own version of justice. If one did that all day every day, it would become work rather than fun.

One of the quirks of the trickster archangel's personality was that despite the fact that he was perfectly willing to run away from Heaven to get away from all of the fighting between his brothers, he didn't like to be entirely left out of things. That had been part of the reason he'd been so close to the Winchesters back in his original home, and why he was getting a crap job at the hospital here now. He could feel that this hospital, or at the very least someone in it was very important for the future. When he found them he would simultaneously test them and bother the hell out of them like he'd done to Sam and Dean.

He'd been departing from the hospital after shaking his new boss' hand when the angel had been brought in. It was hard to tell since it wasn't his universe and his name was written above him in Angelic Script rather than Enochian, and he'd failed his Angelic Script class since he'd never actually thought he'd be using it since everyone spoke and wrote in Enochian back home, but he was reasonably certain that the angel was Danyael whose counterpart in his universe had been a minor angel in Castiel's garrison before Uriel had gone and killed him.

"Don't be afraid." Danyael said as he gripped the arm of the nurse who was looking down at him in concern as he lay on a gurney.

"Don't be afraid?" he said with a chuckle as he left the hospital while Danyael was being dragged down the hall, presumably to an operating room where the doctors would probably be shocked to discover that he wasn't quite as injured as he appeared. "That used to be my line. Never worked though. Everyone I said it to freaked the instant they realized what I was."

While the Trickster Gabriel went off in search of living accommodations that he could make passable, the Gabriel that was native to that universe went wandering around looking for any angels who served under Michael who might be wandering about possibly creating the Nephilim who was supposedly destined to stop the war that was still raging in heaven. While both of them were not quite aimlessly wandering around Los Angeles, Brother Thomas was sitting in his room in the monastery clutching his head and moaning.

Brother Grahm, who ran the monastery's small infirmary and treated things that weren't bad enough to require a trip to the doctor's, sat wondering if he should have Brother Thomas committed. The man wasn't a danger to others, or didn't seem to be at least, and hadn't been too much of a danger to himself after he'd quit throwing furniture around. He seemed quite calm at the moment, if only semi-lucid. So his options were to either try and convince Brother Thomas to have himself committed, or send the man back to his room.

"Do you have a headache?" Brother Grahm asked Brother Thomas who had been clutching his head and moaning for several hours, breaking the long silence.

That at the very least was something he could actually treat. He had some aspirin in the medicine cabinet. Insanity however, not so much.

"No..." Brother Thomas moaned. "It's just that God dumped an angel from another universe into our world."

"And...?" Brother Grahm said, playing along with Brother Thomas' delusion in hopes that the man wouldn't become a problem that he'd have to call the cops for. When Thomas wasn't acting insane like now, he was a nice guy who was relatively easy to get along with, and he'd feel guilty over handing him over to the cops because he was a little ill.

"Imagine an incredibly powerful being that can make things materialize at will, travel through time at will, reorder time to suit his whims, create pocket universes, and turn anything short of an Archangel from his universe into chunky salsa with a snap of his fingers who has an exceedingly twisted sense of humor and a habit of doing incredibly bizarre things to people in the name of justice." Brother Thomas said.

Brother Grahm involuntarily shuddered as he found himself imagining such a creature.

"Now turn him loose in the world, and give him free reign to run around and do whatever he wants to." Brother Thomas said.

Brother Grahm could see why Brother Thomas was clutching his head and moaning, and was glad that such a thing didn't exist in the real world. He'd really hate to live in the world that poor Brother Thomas was living in.

While Brother Grahm was comforting Brother Thomas, Gabriel the Trickster was wandering through an abandoned building, looking around with an eye towards the improvements he'd be making when he moved in. As he made his way across the top floor, that universe's Raphael jumped him without warning. Well, technically, Raphael had jumped the doppelganger he'd created the instant he'd realized that he wasn't alone in the building while he stood by and invisibly watched. He knew better than to trust any of his brothers any farther than he could throw them with his vessel's pinky. He could love them all he wanted, but from the looks of things, they were perfectly willing to kill him here.

The other angel looked puzzled as hell when his doppelganger vanished the instant Raphael had clawed its heart out. That puzzlement vanished soon after, and Raphael started sniffing the air like some sort of animal before going over to the candy bar wrapper he'd dropped earlier, picking it up, sniffing it, and sticking it in his mouth. Two seconds later, Raphael frowned and spat the candy bar wrapper out before perching on a nearby table where he sat there looking either as if he were constipated or trying to solve a particularly difficult problem.

What the hell had Dad been thinking when he created this lot?


	3. Saving Thomas Doggett

Gabriel made another doppelganger and made it walk into the open where Raphael was sitting, perched on the table like a human shaped bird.

"Hi!" he, his doppelganger said cheerfully as he bit into one of his almost ever-present candy bars. "I'm sorta not from around here, and aside from the occasional premonition, I don't have any idea what's going on. You mind filling me in?"

Raphael looked about ready to lunge. Gabriel sighed, snapped his fingers, and froze the other angel in place. From the looks of things, there was no chance of him having a civilized discussion with any of his local brothers.

"Screw this, I'll just go talk to the Prophet. They always know what's going on." he said as he turned to leave, snapping his fingers and freeing his brother's counterpart who seemed to be as much of a dick as his brother with the same name. Of course he could be biased, since this Raphael who was sniffing the air like an animal had just tried to kill first and ask questions later.

He flew off as Raphael lunged through his doppelganger which he'd made intangible for this reason, and crashed into the wall. Upon going to where the prophet he knew of lived and finding that there was no Chuck Shurley in this universe churning out the Winchester Gospels like they were going out of style, he decided to head to somewhere more conducive to meditation so he could open himself to this universe's heaven and receive the names of the local prophets and any other information they might care to give him, which probably wasn't much considering the fact that he was practically an outsider here. With that in mind, he headed to the nearest arcade.

The sun sank lower in the sky until it finally set. As darkness set in, Valerie Rosales entered the room of the angel she'd hit with her car, noticing that he had not eaten his dinner. She apologized to the angel she'd believed to be an ordinary man for hitting him, and he asked her if she would talk with him. She complied and crossed the room to grab one of the chairs that were provided for visitors.

As Valerie moved the chair next to the angel Danyael's bed, Raphael watched over the both of them, perched outside on a spot of the fire escape that gave him a good view through the window. As he kept half an eye on Danyael and the mother of Danyael's future child, he found himself pondering the problem of the extra Gabriel. Namely the problem of why he was here, and whose side he was on. The powerful being who was capable of making convincing duplicates of himself could have easily killed him, but had instead tricked him into taking a header into the nearest wall.

While Raphael watched over Danyael and Valerie, Brother Thomas knelt praying in his room which had been put to rights as much as it ever was, considering the fact that the walls were covered in pages of corrected religious texts and images taken from those texts and others. As he prayed, the dark haired Gabriel of that universe decided to make his grand entrance.

"You monkeys never get that one right." the tall and dark Gabriel with the black coat, black boots, black leather pants, and white shirt said from the shadowed corner where he'd been hiding. "It's not willing servants of heaven, it's _winged_."

As the Gabriel of death, destruction, and resentment of humanity interrogated Brother Thomas Doggett, another Gabriel received the answer he'd been seeking in the middle of a perfect game of skeeball along with a side note that prophets here didn't have Archangel protectors, and that Doggett's name was being tentatively penciled in on the list of Martyrs at that moment.

"Oh shit." Gabriel said as he dropped the last ball on his foot.

He then shoved his pile of tickets into the arms of a small child and flew off. By the time he reached Doggett, the man was on fire and the other Gabriel was gone. Several of the other monks in the monastery who had been worried about Doggett lately and had seen the flames were running to the man's aid, but they would not reach him in time, and if they had been the ones to put the fire out, Doggett would not have survived long with all of his burns.

Fortunately, there was a Gabriel who was sympathetic to the poor man's plight in the room, a Gabriel who wanted answers, and wouldn't let a little thing like the fact that the person who had that answers was on fire and had third degree burns covering his body get in his way. With a snap of the Trickster Gabriel's fingers, the human torch was out, and his wounds were healed.

"This is why Prophets have an archangel assigned to them back home." the Trickster Gabriel said with a sigh as he looked down at the poor prophet who was looking rather surprised to be alive, and somewhat wary of his good fortune. "Now, would you please tell me what the hell is going on around here?"


End file.
